


do you really wanna live forever

by threeturn



Series: tumblr fic [4]
Category: One Direction (Band), X Factor RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Prehistoric, M/M, Reincarnation, Whipping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-23
Updated: 2016-07-23
Packaged: 2018-07-26 07:29:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7565476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threeturn/pseuds/threeturn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’ve spoken half a dozen times and none of it was about anything in particular, but each time Liam gets that feeling anyway. As if he’s forgetting something. As if he's losing the words to his favourite song.</p>
            </blockquote>





	do you really wanna live forever

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://valencing.tumblr.com/post/73100436933/i-mean-this-very-earnestly-why-ziam-help-me), now migrating some of my shortest fics from tumblr for safekeeping.

**40,000 BCE: ZAYN AND LIAM ARE EARLY HUMANS**

After a long day hunting mammoth, Caveman Liam likes to relax by watching Caveman Zayn do cave painting.

“Zayn want Liam build bigger fire?” Caveman Liam asks, trying to make himself useful.

Caveman Zayn grunts his assent, scraping an aurochs onto the cave wall with the burnt end of a stick.

“Zayn paint good,” Caveman Liam says, toting more logs into the cave with his giant caveman muscles and throwing them on the fire. “Zayn want mammoth for tea?”

“Zayn want Liam for tea,” replies Caveman Zayn, because as an early human he has an insufficiently developed prefrontal cortex, which means inhibitions rarely present a barrier to love.

**326 BCE: ZAYN IS AN INTERPRETER IN THE COURT OF KING PURUSHOTTAMA AND LIAM IS A MACEDONIAN SOLDIER IN THE ARMY OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT**

Day after day, the negotiations drag on, Zayn brooding from his spot near the throne, trying not to show how angry he is. That his revered king should have to treat with this foreign invader! That that hulking soldier in Alexander’s entourage keeps looking at him with such gentle, searching eyes!

Later, on a lunch break, Zayn runs into the same brown-eyed brute in a palace corridor.

“Filthy barbarian,” Zayn spits in Prakrit, knowing the man doesn’t speak a word of it.

“Gee, but you’re pretty,” Liam says in Macedonian. Zayn understands completely.

“This means nothing, nothing, nothing,” he warns as he pushes Liam to the wall and ravages him with kisses, fumbling under his cuirass. But Liam doesn’t understand Prakrit; he only knows that Zayn means everything. So a week later, when Alexander’s forces are on the march again, he deserts from the army and finds him.

“I suppose you think you get to have me,” Zayn tells him in Macedonian. “Just as your master thinks all nations his own.”

“Ex-master,” says Liam. He kneels at Zayn’s feet, waits.

“Oh, get up,” says Zayn, exasperated. “You may as well stay for dinner.”

**1410 CE: ZAYN IS THE HEIR TO A SMALL EUROPEAN KINGDOM AND LIAM IS HIS WHIPPING BOY**

From birth, Prince Zayn knows that if he does wrong, Liam will be the one suffering the consequences. Zayn can climb a tree and rip his breeches, or skip mass to read a Canterbury tale, and only Liam will be punished. He takes it so bravely: tears quivering on his lashes, never uttering a sound. Zayn likes Liam, and in order to keep him safe, he tries very hard to be good.

Years pass, and on the day a malicious chamberlain finds him and Liam kissing in a garden, Liam had not been whipped for a very long time.

“You mustn’t,” Zayn pleads when the punishment is decreed, “I’m far too old for a whipping boy, and anyway it isn’t his fault!”

“I don’t mind it, my prince,” says Liam, lips still red from Zayn’s kisses, “honestly I don’t,” and then Zayn has to watch while the whip snaps over and over against Liam’s strong back.

Later, Zayn creeps out to the servants’ quarters to find him, insists on seeing the marks of the whip, touches them with trembling fingers, presses his mouth to Liam’s skin.

**1852 CE: LIAM IS A LIVERPOOL DOCKWORKER AND ZAYN IS A SAILOR ON A MERCHANT SHIP**

Every day Liam looks for the boy on the _Sea Lark_ , the boy he’d noticed when the ship first docked. Sometimes he’s high in the rigging, sometimes he’s carrying in stores for the voyage to come. Once Liam sees him asleep in a coil of rope on the quay, and nudges him awake before his captain finds him.

“Thanks, mate,” the boy says in an ordinary Northern accent, even though Liam had thought he wasn’t English at all.

“S’nothing,” Liam mumbles, and then they stare at each other for much longer than necessary.

Today’s the day the _Sea Lark_ ’s due to sail, though, and Liam’s got a funny sort of pain in his chest. When the ship begins pulling away from the shore, Liam spots the boy at last, standing idle at the railing. Liam waves hopelessly, and then a miracle. Up goes the boy’s hand. Reaching out—to Liam.

“Good-bye!” Liam calls across the water. “Good-bye!” And he can scarcely credit his own eyes when he sees what happens next. The quick twist of the boy’s body, the splash in the water far below.

The cry goes up at once: “Man overboard!” Liam remembers that most sailors can’t swim. It’s the work of a moment to kick off his shoes and dive into the water, but it feels like a year before the boy’s body, shaking with gasps, is in his arms. And then there’s only the swim to shore, and the sight of the _Sea Lark_ in the distance, growing smaller against the horizon.

**2010 CE: LIAM AND ZAYN ARE CONTESTANTS ON XFACTOR, AND, WITH THREE OTHER LADS, ARE ASKED TO FORM A BAND.**

“I just,” says Liam, “I just need a minute to think.”

“Sure, yeah,” says Niall, and the other boys nod, still dazed at their reprieve from heartbreak. Zayn is standing slightly apart, looking at Liam with his big dark eyes, saying nothing. So Liam finds an empty room to sit and think.

Of course they seem like good lads. They’re—he swallows, thinking of Zayn. They’ve spoken half a dozen times and none of it was about anything in particular, but each time Liam gets that feeling anyway. As if he’s forgetting something. As if he's losing the words to his favourite song.

In one of their handful of conversations, Zayn had mentioned that he’d watched Liam on X-Factor two years ago. He was oddly shy about it, too.

“My sister liked you,” mumbled Zayn. It was easy to stare at him because he was looking down, eyelashes dark against his cheeks. Then Zayn lifted his eyes to Liam’s. The shock of it was electric, the flash Liam saw of another Zayn’s face. But Zayn somewhere else, in a place Liam didn’t recognize. He looked—older somehow, his face sharper. Then Zayn, the real Zayn, drew in his breath suddenly, grabbing Liam’s wrist and saying a word that Liam didn’t know.

“Zayn,” said Liam, and Zayn jerked his hand away.

“Sorry,” Zayn said, “sorry, sorry, I don’t know what I—”

“It’s fine,” said Liam, and then, before he could think better of it, “did you see—”

“See what?” Zayn was frowning, upset.

“Never mind.”

Zayn said, “I have to go.” He hunched his shoulders as he walked away.

Zayn hasn’t touched him since then and when they speak it’s a bit awkward. Liam’s not sure he can be in a band with him. Because there’s something wrong with Liam, but it’s only when Zayn’s around. That’s when he sees things. Zayn dressed in strange clothes. Zayn older or younger but still absolutely Zayn. Zayn speaking an unknown language that Liam thinks he might have known once, maybe in a dream, long ago.

There’s a knock at the door. Liam thinks it’s probably Niall, to tell him that the other boys want his answer.

“Come in,” Liam says, and there’s Zayn.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Alphaville's _Forever Young_ , recorded by One Direction for the X-Factor final in 2010.


End file.
